One of the things that makes the Internet so great for business is the fact that you can measure pretty much everything: how many visits, clicks, time spent on your site, and so on and so forth, and that seems enough if you have a solid online marketing strategy, but then social media came around and it changed the rules of the game.

If we think about it plainly, it all has to do with levels of interactions, when the ads where just printed, there wasn’t much one could do to know how people responded, then the radio and the TV came around, and things took a different spin, people could actually change the station or zap away. And then, the quantum leap happened… Internet.

Right now, millions of people can literally interact with each other and your business instantly, and if that wasn’t enough, now they can comment, Digg, follow, like or dislike anything you do. To mention some examples of these, you should take a look at the latest study published by ExactTarget called “Subscribers, Fans and Followers”. The study reveals that daily Twitter users who followed a brand were more than twice as likely to purchase from the brand after becoming a social media follower.

Other results from this same study showed that the pattern among Twitter followers, email subscribers and Facebook fans was similar when asked about whether they would recommend a brand. A third of Twitter followers said they were more apt to make a recommendation now that they followed a brand, compared with 24% of email subscribers and 21% of Facebook fans. Again, those who “liked” a brand on Facebook were most likely to actively disagree with the statement.

Now, in our experience, Social Media is pretty awesome. For us it always has been about letting people know what we do and what we are all about.

It is true, you could say that our approach has not been exactly conventional, but then again, that’s not a word we use around the office all that often. Let me give you an example, from the get go we wanted people to trust us, so we had this idea that we were not going to take payment upfront, in fact, we encouraged customers to pay after they were satisfied, and you know what?, They did!

With that said, what we did was jump on Facebook and start developing a community so we could let everyone know who we are, what we do, and everything else there is to know about us. I mean, have you seen Mike’s puppy? Cute isnt it?.

The kicker is, all of what we did was never about how much money are we investing on this campaign or what ever, f*ck we still haven’t figured that one out… But Ill tell you this, the result? Today we not only have customers, we have fans!!